We’ve already covered what a permalink is and how it is important for your website. Your search engine ranking and user experience.
In this article, we’ll focus on the last building block of a permalink. And that is the slug. The slug, as a part of the permalink, affects your website in pretty much the same way. Meaning, that changing slugs can affect your search engine rankings, user experience, and the work of the developers.
The differences between changing a post slug and changing the permalink structure are:
- Scale – the permalink structure change affects the website as a whole while changing a slug, only affects the pages/posts you are working on.
- Reversibility – once you change the permalink structure, if you decide to go back to the previous one, there most likely will be issues with some slugs. If you change a slug, you can easily get it back (if you remember the previous one).
- Simpler troubleshooting – If you must change the permalink structure, issues will be all over your website, while if a slug should be changed the potential issues could be fixed with a simple 301 redirect.
NB! This is not to say that one is better than the other. This is impossible, as they are both part of the same thing.
How to Change Post Slug in WordPress
The slug is that part of the permalink that identifies the exact page, post, or category.
Say, you are writing an article about the polar bears. WordPress will automatically generate the slug, using the title. But you can easily change it to whatever you want.
Of course, we highly recommend keeping the slug relevant to the article’s title. If the title you’ve chosen is something like Basic Facts About Polar Bears you can change the post slug to be /polar-bears/. So, when a user enters the article he or she will see the title, but the post will be located at www.yourgreensite.com/polar-bears/.
You can make that change at any time. Yet, much like with permalinks, best practices are to set and forget. Meaning, to never change it. Yet, maybe you’ve misspelled something. Bear in mind that if the page is old and well-ranked it most likely will be better off as it is.
If you insist on changing it, and your website is too new, or not well ranked, or the post itself is new, here is how to change the post slug.
Right below the post title bar, you can see the post permalink. If the post is assigned to a category the permalink ought to be something like https://domainname.com/category-name/post-slug.
Right next to the link you can see an Edit button. Should you decide to change the automatically generated post slug, click that button and change it to your liking.
Check and double-check for mistakes. If there are none, you can click the OK button that is now there instead of the Edit one.
Find out how to optimize post slug.
